Can you admit your failures? Could you stand up in front of your peers and say "I am a failure"? I doubt it. Few of us like to openly admit we fail. Yet we all do - in small ways on a daily basis and in big, embarrassing, cry in the corner ways too. So why is it so hard to talk about failure with honesty?

Too often we equate the word "failure" with just one level of failure - Hindenburg-level Fukashimas of catastrophe where history is altered on a global scale. But failure comes in many levels, and many are actually good failures.

When you pilot an idea, you should expect many little failures – that's how you learn what works and what doesn't. You itinerate based on those failures - or as they say in technology "fail early and often", to develop a model that works. Once you take that model to scale, there will be many more opportunities to fail. Even then, we should not take it personally.

In international development, we are working in some of the most challenging environments on earth – it's our mission to go where others have failed to make a difference and help create lasting change. By the very definition of our calling, we should expect that we will fail, and fail often. If our work were easy, someone else would have solved the problems of poverty, pollution, corruption and the like long ago.

In the area of development work, ICT4D - which looks at using information and communication technologies to accelerate development - there are just as many failures as in other development disciplines, but we've taken a different attitude towards our shortcomings. We have begun to celebrate failure as a mark of innovation and risk-taking in developing ideas to create a global impact.

In Washington and London we have an annual Fail Faire to showcase how our grand ideas splatter across the windshield of reality. While no one aspires to present at Fail Faire when they start a new project, it is a safe space to share the pain and underlying causes to advance our understanding of best (and worst) practices, and reduce the probability of future failures.

The acceptance of failure is growing across the international development field. The World Bank was an early supporter of Fail Faires and the new president is pushing for the organisation to institutionalise the honest discussion of failure in its work. Other leading organisations are also embracing failure as a positive indication of leadership – just look at the Fail Faire supporter and speaker list.

What is telling for me is the other side of failure – success. We are actually successful in international development, and failure is a key part of that. Last year, the World Bank came out with a study of their ICT4D projects that suggested the bank had a 70% failure rate with these types of projects. Here's why:

In the Silicon Valley, arguably the most successful business incubation environment in the world today, venture capitalists expect a 10% success rate. They know 90% of their investments will fail when they go to market, and that's acceptable. Now here is the World Bank, a slow, methodical bureaucracy working in market failure environments, where most venture capitalists fear to go, and the Bank has three times the success rate.

So let us change the meaning of failure in international development. Let us fail with pride, because failure is really success. Failure shows leadership, risk-taking and innovation. It shows that we are succeeding in finding and improving solutions to poverty and injustice. Because the only way to not fail is not to do anything.

Wayan Vota is communications manager at Development Gateway and the organiser of Fail Faire DC and Fail Faire UK.

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